


Soak This Up, Keep It Forever

by numberdance



Category: District Ballet Company, The Girl With the Red Balloon
Genre: Amnesia, Ballet, F/M, Time Travel, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 09:07:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13714488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/numberdance/pseuds/numberdance
Summary: Ellie doesn't remember, mostly. She still knows that those months in East Germany were real.In which Ellie continues to be a sponge, has her memory jogged by a ballet, and does magic for a little girl.





	Soak This Up, Keep It Forever

There was a peace and a joy to Duo Concertant as the couple stood by the pianist and violinist, listening to the music. Ellie would have expected to grow impatient -- she was here to see dance -- but this seemed like a part of the piece, not just an introduction or overture. And then the dancers took hands and walked out to the center, and their dance together was love and trust, teasing and intimacy. They were responding to the music and to their companionship. They danced for each other, not the audience. 

It felt familiar in a way that romance and banter had for months -- since Germany. Not before. Since the moment when she had grabbed the ribbon of a red balloon to take a picture, and... Ellie wasn't really sure what had happened. She felt like months had passed between grabbing that string and letting go, but she didn't remember months, and neither did anyone else. The only counterevidence she had was occasional hazy recognition of things she couldn't explain, more knowledge of East Berlin than she could have gleaned from a tour guide or museum, vastly improved German, and the dove-shaped letter in her pocket.

But when she didn't focus on it too hard, Ellie thought she remembered being in love. Scared, too. But in love, and happy, and comfortable with people she never should have met.

The music shifted, and the lighting, and now the two dancers were in darkness with only a spot of brightness. They searched for each other, hands reaching out to seek contact, faces distraught. They were lost. They found each other, wrapped around each other -- and then she pulled away, leaving him to seek.

Ellie sat numb in her seat, her fingers tightening around the piece of paper in her pocket. That... she...

The dancers hands moved past each other in the light as the music faded. Not quite finding each other.

Ellie focused on breathing, in and out and in and out, but it didn't lessen the feelings of loss. She always felt a wisp of it, like she had loved someone (as the letter said) but only being able to look at that feeling sideways, not straight on. But this confronted it directly.

Kai. Kai. Mitzi. Sabina. Aurora. Kai. Panic and snark and fear and poison, him unfurling her hand and washing it, him leaving and coming back, candles, the roof, the concert, so much death and so much love.

So much, all of a sudden, and these had to be memories. They weren't all in the letter. These had to be real, not just what she imagined based on the scrawl on the dove her hand was cramping around. Everyone else was clapping, but Ellie couldn't move; she sat and cried and let the words echo.

Be a sponge be good soak this up be sparkly keep it forever may your destination be full of freedoms

Good-bye, Ellie Baum.

The lights came up, and Ellie tried to hold onto those memories and voices, tried to keep it from fading away, but they never stayed when they hit like this. What she could grasp became a little fuller, a little brighter, but it was never a complete memory. She closed her eyes and sighed. 

"Hey, are you okay? Can I get you something?"

Ellie startled and turned; it was the man two seats down from her. He had a little girl -- Ellie assume she was his daughter -- on his lap. The girl must have abandoned her own seat at some point, but Ellie hadn't noticed. "I'm okay, I think. Thanks. The ballet just made me remember someone."

The little girl piped up. "That was Mama."

Ellie blinked, confused, and then she caught up. "The dancer onstage?" The little girl nodded. "She was amazing," Ellie said. "Do you come watch her a lot?"

"Yes, but sometimes I get tired, and sometimes we watch behind."

"Backstage," the man corrected, smiling at the girl. He looked up at Ellie. "What about you? Do you come often?"

"This is my first time at a ballet."

The man grinned. "Welcome, then. I hope you're enjoying it. Duo has hit me hard sometimes, too. The ending is unexpected."

"Yeah." Ellie's voice is a little hoarse, but she swallows and continues. "The first one was gorgeous, all the colors and turning. And I liked the second too, it was just -- emotional. I like trying new things, soaking everything up."

The little girl bounced a little on her dad's knee, and he looked down at her. "No breaking me, Piper. Do you want to stay or watch Mama more?"

"Watch," the girl said, sliding down from his knee and spinning before sitting in her own seat. "I'm going to dance and be a bird flapping my wings and an emerald and a girl in blue."

Ellie had no idea what most of that meant, but something the girl said tugged at a not-quite-memory. Ellie took a small, loose square of paper out of her program. It had a casting change printed on it, but Ellie had already written the change in her program. (She wanted to remember everything, with no chance of losing the memory.) 

She didn't know how she knew how to do this, but she folded a dove. (Maybe she had just followed the creases on the letter in her pocket so many times, she had tried to tell herself, but she knew that was wrong.) Ellie leaned down and showed the dove to the little girl, who had been watching her. "It's a bird," the girl said.

"A dove," Ellie agreed. And then the wings flapped on their own.

"Whoaaaaa," the girl said. Ellie knew the man was watching, too. "How are you doing that?"

"Magic," Ellie said. She hoped she sounded mysterious.

She knew that what had happened in Berlin was real. It had to have been. 

If you give a girl a red balloon, her whole world will change, and she won't know why.

**Author's Note:**

> I love George Balanchine's Duo Concertant (which is why this is the second fic I've written inspired by it). The two parts are so different, and the first time I saw the piece I found that jarring, but now it's part of what I love about it. Sometimes stories have sharp change points. I thought about using Dawson's On the Nature of Daylight for this piece instead, but Duo would not get out of my head, and it fit.
> 
> The referenced first piece is meant to be Jessica Lang's Her Door to the Sky. They're not mentioned at all, but the other two pieces on the program are Ratmansky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Robbins's The Concert. It's an arts-themed mixed rep. (Other pieces I considered for such a program: Wheeldon's Strapless, Anastos's Yes Virginia Another Piano Ballet.)


End file.
